So, it is an irony that Moorcock remains largely unfilmed – or unfilmable – while the writer most responsible for turning fantasy into global entertainment, if posthumously, is his old antithesis J R R Tolkien. Moorcock liked Tolkien in person; he visited the old professor in Oxford and found him ­polite and personable. But it’s not hard to see Tolkien as a complacent, hierarchical force of Law in opposition to Moorcock’s free-ranging, morally complex Chaos. In 1978, Moorcock made the conflict explicit in a jeremiad against the old inkling entitled “Epic Pooh” (as in Winnie-the-Pooh), which accused Tolkien of propagating a ­sentimental Luddism while blithely promoting war.

“I think he’s a crypto-fascist,” says Moorcock, laughing. “In Tolkien, everyone’s in their place and happy to be there. We go there and back, to where we started. There’s no escape, nothing will ever change and nobody will ever break out of this well-­ordered world.”

You just can't help but think Mr. Moorcock is suffering from some severely sour grapes; or perhaps he spent a little too much time visiting the twilight zone back in the psychedelic 60's.